- During the pandemic, smaller municipalities with minimal IT budgets can use ol-kit’s fully customisable toolkit to analyse patterns within their communities to better contain the virus
- The companies said that they had started working on this mapping framework four years ago
1904labs and Bayer Crop Science, a division of German life sciences company Bayer AG have jointly released a new geospatial mapping framework to the open source community. It said that this kit is an easy-to-use, map component toolkit built with React and OpenLayers and is compatible with many popular open source tools in the geospatial community.
The companies said that they had started working on this mapping framework four years ago. It added that internally the ol-kit is a backbone for many of Bayer’s applications for managing fields, research experiments, monitoring yields. They collect a huge amount of data. The interactive map makes it possible to interpret the data.
Geospatial capabilities to study and solve critical challenges
Shaun Diltz, principal product manager at Bayer Crop Science said, “This is an important piece of functionality from which small businesses, governments, and community organizations would see tremendous benefit. Contributing to the open source community wasn’t something that our group had done before, but it was well worth the effort, and I can’t wait to see how ol-kit is used.”
Its core code is available for anyone to view, change, or use in their own way free of charge. The companies added that as the use of location plays a big role in the global economy, open sourcing ol-kit will enable small business and community organisations alike to leverage its geospatial capabilities to study and solve critical challenges. The organisations may not have been able to afford to tackle them previously.
During the pandemic, smaller municipalities with minimal IT budgets can use ol-kit’s fully customisable toolkit to analyse patterns within their communities to better contain the virus. It can further be used to provide helpful insights and chart trends in areas like census tracking, election mapping, and combating natural disasters like wildfires.
